A hammer in every sewing kit.

Skirt

A weekly update? Has the world gone completely mad? YES. I’m back, a mere week later, to update on the Rainbow skirt progress. Squares for days is the thing. I’m almost done with the cutting part. I say “almost done” I mean “Blue and purple to finish but those are the big numbers and I may fall down insensible before I get to the last 50 squares”.

I probably could have taken the “20” tags off for the photo, if we’re being honest. I was bundling them up into 10s, but then I remembered I can also count by 2s because I am pretty amazing, mathematically. As of right this very minute, I have 35 more blue to cut, and 250 purple. I’ve already cut 20 purple, but I didn’t put that bundle in the picture because it would have messed up the aesthetic. I take these things super seriously, as you know.

This last paragraph was going to be something along the lines of “I cut all those squares and didn’t slice my finger open!”. However, I was preparing a strip of blue to cut up and it’s entirely possible I sliced my finger open. Brilliantly, I wasn’t even cutting fabric at the time. I’m not sure how it happened, possibly I was waving the rotary cutter about with reckless abandon. Sounds like something I’d do.

I love a stupidly massive project. Mostly what I’ve been making recently is Morsbags (I’ve made 515 now, you may applaud softly). While they’re satisfying to make and a delight to give to people, I wanted something I could obsess over and sink my teeth into and probably spend a few years on. Something that’s been floating in my brain for a few years now is a rainbow patchwork skirt. The one at the link there is magnificent and mine will be a pale imitation because where she used 10 tiers, I’m slacking right off and only using 8. This is just to simplify the colour hunting, to be honest.

With 8 tiers I have 8 colours, starting at white and ending at purple. The way the skirt is sewn, you increase each tier by half the length of the one above it., except for the last tier which is twice the length of the one above. This is for swoosh. There’s just no point if you don’t have swoosh. After sorting out the length and planning a waist size that will allow me to gain weight again (not that I plan to, I just bounce around the scales a lot), I’ve ended up with a combined total of 652 squares, with the bottom hem running to 29.7 meters. Yep.

The first thing I did was buy some new blades for my rotary cutter. Then I went to the opshop and rummaged about a bit for fabric. I need to rummage again for orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. White, pink and red are done. The red was a near thing as I was 2 squares short and out of red fabric to play with. I squeezed out another couple of squares from my test sewing piece. Barely. This is so dramatic!

As it stands tonight, I’ve still got 30 to cut in orange, 55 to cut in yellow, 80 to cut in green, 90ish to cut in blue and 265 to cut in purple. I’m also suddenly reminded that the last time I made a mammoth project skirt, I didn’t end up ever wearing it.